Design loads are an important part of the aircraft design process. For example, the structural design of the aircraft is based at least in part on flight loads. The flight loads are typically derived through a combination of the aerodynamic loads, aircraft inertia, structural flexibility, and engine loads.
The structural design stage of the aircraft design process can be incredibly complex. Indeed, the complexity of the structural design stage for many modern aircraft is continually increasing as the design criteria for modern aircraft grow in complexity. For example, the number of design variables and constraints for a typical flight loads balancing process performed on a high-performance aircraft, such as the Boeing® Company's X-45 combat drone or Unmanned Combat Air vehicle (UCAV), may include thousands of balanced conditions in design loads development and fatigue load assessments.
Notwithstanding the aforementioned complexity, the structural design of an aircraft is highly dependent on the timeliness and accuracy of design flight loads. Design flight loads are used for determining whether an aircraft structure will be able to endure the demands placed on it during flight. The aircraft must not only be capable of enduring the forces, pressures and stresses while the aircraft is flying level at a constant speed, but the aircraft must also be able to withstand the additional forces, pressures and stresses that arise while the aircraft is being maneuvered. The additional forces, pressures and stresses placed on the aircraft during a maneuver can be considerable especially when the aircraft is executing high-speed maneuvers such as a climbs, dives, banking turns, rolls, etc.
To determine the forces, pressures and stresses an aircraft is experiencing during a maneuver, a flight loads balancing process may be performed by a loads engineer. With known processes, however, the loads engineer must access various fragmented resources (e.g., stand-alone programs or applications, databases, files, etc.) in a piecemeal fashion to balance flight loads.
Moreover, known balancing processes only allow for a single flight maneuver time instance to be processed at a time. Thus, a time-consuming and cumbersome iterative process must be performed to balance the flight loads at a plurality of time instances.
Known balancing processes also require considerable user intervention (e.g., data entry, time instance designation, etc.) for each and every time instance immediately before the flight loads are balanced at that time instance. Such labor intensive processes lead to even further expenditures of valuable resources and time.
In addition, it is often necessary for the loads engineer to balance the flight loads at numerous critical load points of the flight maneuver. For example, loads and strength analysis groups usually require balanced flight loads at the time instances whereat the absolute maximum and minimum load points of the maneuver occur. Unlike the loads and strength analysis groups, however, the fatigue analysis group is typically interested in all of the peak and valley points of the maneuver. Ideally, several hundred or even a few thousand balanced load cases are required for fatigue analysis. With known processes, balancing the flight loads at such a great number of time instances can be especially taxing upon the loads engineers and require considerable expenditures of time and resources.